Freddy Rodíguez
Back in the day, when NBC was the network to beat, one of the shiniest of his crown jewels, along with four hundred Law & Order spin-offs, was ER, the always engaging and often brilliant drama about life in a big-city emergency room. A wide range of stars passed through its doors, from George Clooney to Noah Wylie, from Juliana Margulies to Ming-Na Wen.
Daniella Alonso
You’ll be reminded of ER, over and over, when you watch The Night Shift. Everything about it is polished, sincere, and oh-so-familiar, except now the hospital administrator–Rodríguez himself–is not a brave crusader fighting to keep the hospital together, he’s a loathsome prick who yells at his staff and gets punched for it. And beyond the sideswipes at everything from Obamacare, there is a weirdly violent streak to this medical drama. They do mention the night shift is made up of ex-military types (so there’s a veiled insult in there somewhere), but in the first half hour the main character comes in all beat up, there’s a major wrestling match in the ER, and the aforementioned prick administrator gets punched out. And one of the doctors–the one who’s not an Afghanistan vet–is a mixed martial artist who, we see, can deliver a very efficient sleeper hold. (Whatever happened to the days that surgeons always wore gloves and wouldn’t shake hands for fear of damaging their fingers?)
All in all, the show has slipped in long after NBC’s other shows have folded up their tents for the night. It’s hard to remember the last time a series that premiere in April or May ever came back for a second shift (so to speak), excluding a few reality shows. (Rookie Blue on ABC, maybe, though that was produced and purchased, done and done, from Canadian television. This was not.)
Still: you can see Freddie Rodríguez at his nastiest, and very little of Daniella Alonso (so little it’s not entirely clear if she’s an intern, a resident, or a nurse). And it is just about the only new thing on NBC for a while. With so little original programming for the next few weeks–at least until the cable networks start their off-season–there aren’t a whole lot of alternatives.
